Why Joaquin Phoenix’s favourite ‘Joker’ scene was cut from the movie
Only an actor as wildly talented as Joaquin Phoenix could stand up to the phenomenal performance that Heath Ledger gave as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and make it entirely his own. Phoenix’s effort in the 2019 Batman villain origin story by Todd Phillips remains one of the actor’s most mesmerising.
Set in 1981, Joker details the life of the failed clown and wannabe stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck as he descends into an ever-worsening state of mental instability, leading to him invariably becoming the iconic villain of Gotham City. Also starring Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, and Frances Conroy, Phillips’ movie won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
However, as acclaimed as the film was, that did not mean that there weren’t moments that might have made it even better. Phoenix once admitted that he had been blown away by one particular scene in Joker, but Phillip had decided to cut it under the understanding that it just didn’t work with the rest of the film.
During an interview with Collider, Phoenix opened up on the cut moment, noting, “There was a scene that, during the shoot, we thought was one of the best scenes, and we loved his behaviour in the scene, and I’d always really liked the scene. But Todd told me and said, ‘We’re cutting that scene out’.”
The actor must have been upset that his favourite moment from Joker was getting the director’s chop, but after seeing the final product, he understood why Phillips made the decision, noting, “Then of course I saw it, and it was very obvious. It has to go. It actually doesn’t work.”
He added, “That’s just what’s so cool about movies, right? You can have a great scene, it’s something that makes sense, but the movie is the collection of all of these scenes and they have to work together to tell the story, and it actually made that whole sequence so smooth.”
In the same interview, Phillips pointed out that he deletes scenes from a given movie “for a reason”, admitting, “I have a thing against extended cuts and I kind of hate deleted scenes. The movie that exists is exactly the movie we want it to be.”
The question still remained, though, about what the missing scene that Phoenix loved so much actually was, but thankfully, Phillips cleared that up, noting, “It was basically a scene between him and Randall — Randall’s the guy he kills with the scissors — and it was a scene with them on the stairwell leading up to the Ha-Ha’s offices. There was a scene right after he paints the sign”.
